NHS Supply Chain launches food and catering procurement resource
Web page will support trusts to adopt government standards for catering services
NHS Supply Chain has launched a new web page to support trusts working to adopt the new Government Buying Standards (GBS) for food and catering services launched by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
The page has been added to NHS Supply Chain’s existing catering micro site to provide trusts with information about catering suppliers and their product ranges that meet the new standards and help them improve nutritional values and buy more sustainably.
The GBS for food and catering services cover the procurement of food produced to higher sustainability and nutritional standards. Originally introduced in 2011 following a successful trial across a selection of public sector organisations, the standards include a number of key sustainable and nutritional criteria for food such as animal welfare, salt and saturated fat reduction, food waste and packaging.
“Hospital catering has come to the forefront of public attention over the past couple of years and many NHS trusts have already been working hard to develop the nutritional content and sustainable credentials of hospital food to improve the patient experience” said Stephanie Proctor, ethical and sustainability manager at NHS Supply Chain. “GBS are a priority category for NHS Supply Chain and we are working hard to increase the visibility of supplier information for NHS trusts.
She added: “As a business, we fully support the standards. They provide clear guidelines for how NHS trusts can take a more sustainable approach to procuring food and catering services. Our new web page provides a simple and straightforward way for trusts to compare products on NHS Supply Chain framework agreements against the criteria set out in the GBS, helping to meet their own sustainability objectives.”
The web page supports NHS Supply Chain’s wider commitment to the GBS. This includes the provision of GBS information on all future catering framework agreement tenders and ongoing work with suppliers to provide clear details of individual products and their compliance with specific GBS criteria.